"The Russian based 'Pirate Pay' startup is promising the entertainment industry a pirate-free future. With help from Microsoft, the developers have built a system that claims to track and shut down the distribution of copyrighted works on BitTorrent. Their first project, carried out in collaboration with Walt Disney Studios and Sony Pictures, successfully stopped tens of thousands of downloads." Each of which, naturally, ran out to buy the film in question right away, recouping the costs for hiring the firm. None of these people, naturally, simply tried again a few hours later. Primo plan, guys.

Well, I don't see these efforts as targeting every single download. Even statistically curbing, say, 70% of torrents floating around would be a huge win for the industry. Sure, some heavy and experienced users would still got their way through but, a heavy user is still just still a single lost customer, something that they can easily compensate with thousands of one-timers put off by few unsuccessful attempts on most popular sites. Just pushing most common media consumers through the "imagined" inconvenience barrier is the wholly grail of the content industry.
Of course the easiest way for them is to completely kill bit torrent operation. That technology gives them the same advantage that seeders used for their immunity: not being under the same jurisdiction as interested parties. Even if their DDOS like practices turn out to be illegal, when majority of them can be performed from other country, not much can be done. There's a reason the selected company is seated in Russia (of course besides it being home to lots of bright IT minds).